Chindie

I think that's giving any terrorist group too much credit. I'd stake good money they didn't have the faintest idea of any weakness of the Belgian services. And if wager that even if they now did, it wouldn't particularly influence they way they did things. What the communication problems between departments and districts highlights is a weakness that lets things be missed, or fall through the cracks. Now they have been burnt by it, they can try to close that crack and stop it happening again. The communication failings let this group get lucky.

The French were blindsided. It happens. The Belgians were hit by a cell they knew, linked to the French atrocities, that they had already in part apprehended and dealt with in the aftermath of Paris, after it took them 4 months to find the remaining perpetrator they had discovered a stone's throw from his known residences, by people they knew and by people they'd been told to monitor. They dropped the ball, badly. By all accounts a lot of home truths are coming out about the Belgian security services, not least of all the fact that different elements of it don't speak to each other, seemingly due to language issues, which just seems bizarre.

Having watched more of the live stream (which if still going, 8 hours after it started) most of these titles are gimmicks or absolutely dreadful. There are a handful that seem to gain anything from VR.

It's not going to be a generational leap. As far as games are concerned at absolute worst you might see the new model capable of higher detail (slightly better textures, slightly more detailed models - same as pushing the graphics slider on a PC between high and ultra, perhaps). More likely it'll be frame rate and resolution consistent and stable across titles, which the PS4 nearly does anyway. And the consistent rumour is 4k gaming resolution, which everyone is reporting as an upscaler because it's the only way they could do it and sell any of them. Anything else starts to significantly split the user base and potentially cause compatibility issues. Elsewhere it might have capability for UHD Blu-ray, and more likely HDR, which will cost little to add in and is this year's buzz tech in TVs, and might be a more significant development than 4k is, if your TV can decode it, which isn't guaranteed even if you bought a new TV yesterday. It's probably not going to offer much 90% of people will either notice or need.

I wouldn't think of it like that. Sony aren't about to release a PS5, and abandon the PS4. It's most likely they're going to be releasing a revision of the PS4, at a higher price point, which offers fairly minor performance and feature upgrades - stable frame rates, consistent 1080p, perhaps some more grunt to handle VR without the need for the breakout box, capable of 4k upscaling, maybe UHD video capability. On the scale of things none of that is a game changer. It's nice, and developers will be happy to have a bit more scope for stable performance, but at the end of the day it's a PS4 still. Playing the same games. I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade if that was the offering. It's nice. But wouldn't be enough to splash out unless the money was burning a hole in my pocket.

Not enough burning people in your back catalogue for her tastes, or too much?

Swim Deep are a local band who are so 80s it hurts in many respects.

Yep, completely same reaction here. When that scene started I was thinking 'surely not?!' and as the camera panned up to that reveal I was shaking my head in disbelief and turned to my girlfriend and said 'come on, really!?' laughing and she was doing the same thing. It's absurd.

40% of the prison population isn't Muslim. It's more like 14%. The Christian prison population is nearly 50%. I assume we'll be sending all church going people to the camps. The other 'stats' are misleading as well. The Tamil Tigers 'invented' suicide attacks in the modern era and they were active until 2009 - they aren't Muslims. Historically the methodology had been used by Russians, the Japanese famously, etc etc. Not all suicide bombers are Muslim. Like the Tamil Tigers the Kyrds have also used it for nationalistic aims. There's been an obvious vogue for it in the last 20 odd years amongst Islamic extremism, but it's not uniquely Islamic by any means. The 'stat' that there have been more in the last 3 years than the past 100 is very misleading. You can also say that there have been examples of cyber attacks in the last 3 years than the last 100 - it's simply down to the fact it's a relatively new tactic in this style. The figure is meaningless. Suicide bombing is, as Robert Pape will tell you, quite successful - groups undertaking suicide bombing tend to achieve more of their aims than groups that do not use it. It's also a very 'successful' tactic generally. It carries a greater punch than is equivalents, because the bomber has control to the nth degree and can hit much more effectively than a static bomb. Combine that with various things going on the world on the Islamic sphere and how it can tie into versions of Islam and can why it's become popular. But that still doesn't change the fact that the stat is incredibly misleading to make out this is a long standing problem being exponentially worse recently, when really its only a comparatively modern thing that has grown in the last decade or so, and still, on the scale of things, remains fairly minor, even of you go beyond the UK and extend it to Europe generally. As for the world getting more dangerous... Statistically not really. Terrorism is still a blip on death tolls worldwide, thankfully. I always quote this, but I always remember it from essay research - in every year apart from 2001, Americans were more likely to die drowning in a public toilet than in an act of terrorism.

Picking up on the ending a minute, I had 2 problems with it. Massive ending spoilers for Batman v Superman follow I can see why they did it, and Snyder has also given his own apparent reasons, but it doesn't work. It's too forced, too rushed, and too cynical.

What was happening was the ritual death and desecration of any remaining life in the Terminator franchise. Awful film. Emilia Clarke is a hopeless actor and absolutely nothing like Sarah Connor in any facet. Her arrival firing the pistol with the gun bouncing around in her hand and her shutting her eyes was ridiculous for an apparently trained badass character.

Giant Bomb are doing an Oculus live stream currently, and watching it I still can't quite escape from the fact that this technology, for gaming at least, at this moment in time, only seems to revolutionise experiences where you are seated in a first person environment. I've not seen everything there is on offer so I'm prepared to revisit that opinion, and of course it's still early days in VR, but on current showing I would run out to join the VR revolution. At worst some of these titles are bad tech demos to my eyes.

I'd be surprised if they went down the add on route. I think they will release a '2016 PS4.5' or whatever. All the rumours point towards relatively minor hardware tweaks that I would be surprised if many people would put down significant money to have - 4k capability (UHD Blu-ray maybe?), slight performance boosts, possibly 'cleaner' VR capability. I see them marketing it almost as a PS4 premium that offers better entertainment centre offering and slightly improved performance for an additional cost, and they keep selling the basic PS4 as their bread and butter.

I wonder whether this is a counter intuitive result of the internet? We've now all got more access to global information and we're all more aware of the global situation, and therefore the desire for media coverage of far-flung issues has diminished - I.e. in the 80s when a major event happened a reporter would be sent to check it out and it was on the news, it was a big deal, now your phone can tell you minute by minute about even minor events in places you couldn't find on a map, with live video whenever you want, so the media doesn't bother with it. Inversely, it's also allowed for stories that might have remained local to go national, which further drowns out the international 'norm' of African tragedies and Middle Eastern slaughters and so on - a scandal in Northumberland that on the 70s might tension a local news issue can grow today to be national, for example. I wonder whether the Stafford hospital scandal makes the News at 10 20 years ago, for instance? You also have to balance 24 hour news coverage as well - these burn out stories faster than they did before and they've changed the way news is reported to compensate. We saw last week photographers and reporters rush to get photos of injured distressed people on a bus leaving the Brussels airport chasing the latest image that defines a tragedy. We didn't have that even when I was a kid, the news was more restrained and the story was only reported 3 times a day so you didn't need the constant push for the latest angle.

Dara O'Briain does a very funny slight aside skit in one of his early stand ups about people who expect you take your shoes off in their homes. I can't find it on YouTube sadly but I think pretty much the same. I take my shoes off on my own home but elsewhere I'm slightly aggrieved when someone asks. It's basically saying 'we assume you're dirty'. Anywho... People who swear badly. I've been watching a few YouTube videos of games due out in the next few months and I've noticed a few commentators who simply have really cringeworthy ways of speaking that make me what to punch them repeatedly. Hearing a fat geek excitedly say 'gonna get this fat bitch' with too much conviction to make it cool, or scream 'ah this really bad person!' is making my ears bleed.

We've been over this before. There has been a fair amount of media coverage. Only this morning, when responsibility was claimed, the story was the headline news on the front page of the Beeb. Even now it's the on the front page even when the story has developed into 'Head of state states bloody obvious'. Unfortunately we haven't developed, yet, a globalised 'we feeling' where we act and think like a planetary community. Until that point, unfortunately stories about tragedies in far flung places, where we feel those tragedies are common, and where the common man on the street of the UK probably doesn't have much connection to that place, don't make waves in the media and don't make waves in the political sphere either. That might change eventually. Probably not in our lifetimes. Until that time, tragedies in Europe, and moreover tragedies in places with a common cultural root to the UK, from similar sources (I.e. Islamic flavour terrorism currently) where the norm is not perceived to be extremist violence, will have far greater coverage and far greater political heft than tragedies in Africa, Middle East and Asia. Unless those tragedies are so horrific they can't be ignored. Personally, I wouldn't have any of these solidarity actions for any nation. They don't achieve anything, are entirely for show, and only seek to show the bastards currently inspired by a stupid book to turn themselves into red mist and flying splinters of bone and murdering dozens of innocent right minded people that they managed to get the global media eye exactly as they wanted. But for the time being, if we must do this, it's not a shock that a tragedy in Belgium, a near neighbour unused to bombings, is more likely to inspire such actions than a tragedy in Pakistan which is remote to most of the UK, isn't on our doorstep, isn't tying into the IS narrative, but does fit into a narrative the UK didn't really care about - that this kind of thing happens to Pakistan a lot. Israel has a similar standing.

The consoles gave been considered notably underpowered since release, a lot of developers were underwhelmed with the specs and felt they should have been a bit better. A minor upgrade could have knock on effects for titles gong forward and improve the experience. It would split the userbase though and probably would be a difficult sell - consoles aren't phones and that mindset of upgrades just isn't there. 4k probably doesn't sell it either - especially as it'll be just an upscaler.

Numerous developers have apparently confirmed its on the cards so at this point I think it's a matter of when, not if. The rumours of it being 4k capable are likely to be slightly incorrect though. It'll have an upscaler, little else.

I'm interested in the Ultimate Cut simply to see whether the extra 30 minutes is just chucking more stuff in, or whether it smoothes out some of the editing. It certainly adds in characters - Jena Malone was cut entirely and rumour was played a pretty significant character - but I'm hoping it'll develop things a bit. It won't fix the script though, when one of, if not the, significant moments in the movie was so stupid the immediate reaction is absolute bewilderment, no amount of extra scenes are fixing it. Incidentally the Kingdom of Heaven Directors Cut makes that into a genuinely decent movie, it makes it into a more obviously ensemble piece and fleshes out whole plotlines to the extent the movie actually makes sense where previously it didn't at all.

Saw BvS. Er. I dunno what to make of it. I don't think it's as bad as Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of reviews would have you believe, but it certainly isn't a masterpiece. There's problems with it everywhere. Throughout the film characters do things for no reason other than the plot requires them to. There are literally dozens of these moments, and they aren't the kind that you notice the next day, you'll notice them sat there in the cinema. Entire plot elements hang off characters doing something that simply doesn't make sense. The movie also writes itself into a corner in a pivotal moment and the way it gets out of it will nearly make you laugh instantly. It's all the more funny when you realise some of the implications of that narrative escape hatch - the idea isn't a completely awful one (it isn't a good one either), but they do it completely brainlessly which makes the entire thing absurd, it also makes a certain character look like a complete clearing in the woods. It's immediately obvious that the script is going to the hobble the movie and that comes to pass. Affleck is actually decent as both Bruce Wayne and this take on Batman, but this is pretty much Batman in name only and is again undermined by the script. He acts like the Dark Knight Returns take on Batman, but this is undermined wholly by his willingness to kill. Batman in this movie must have a body count in the dozens. He quite literally murderers someone at one point, and wracks up the rest of the body count by happily shooting at and blowing up things filled with people. It's also established early on that he brands some criminals which the film gleefully tells you amounts to a death sentence in prison. His entire motivation for the movie is he wants to kill Superman. Batman isn't a murderer. Even in his most brutal interpretation, he doesn't kill anyone, he will go out of his way to not kill. The film nearly grasps the wider characterisation of Batman but then misses. He moves like Batman and fights like him, in some ways he thinks like him, but he does stupid illogical things, and the script ultimately makes him out to be a stupid right wing meathead. It's at one and the same time the best modern era comic Batman, and also the worst as it betrays fundamental elements of the character. Superman is joyless in the film, actually does very little in it, and at one moment acts in a manner completely at odds with the character they've established because otherwise the movie doesn't work. Wonder Woman is on screen for at best 10 minutes total, and has dialogue that could fit on postage stamp, but is a good interpretation of her from the finale's showing. Lex is a weird take on the character, and intensely irritating, with muddied motivation, but kinda works overall. Amy Adams could be replaced by some wood and nobody would notice. There's also the completely bizarre dream sequences. Back to back we get 2 dream sequences that come completely out of nowhere. Both have a purpose but both should have been cut. The first tries to explain Bruce's mindset with a nightmare of a world where Superman has gone unchecked and everything has fallen to disaster. I could hear people completely confused by this, and I would have been too has I not seen some merchandise refer to this Batman as Knightmare Batman. It doesn't need it, by that point we've established Bruce's motivation and distrust of Superman, reasonably successfully, all this does is confuse things. I suspect it's also a premonition of a Justice League movie but can't confirm that. Then we get an absolutely bizarre, and jarringly obvious nod to the Justice League. This serves no purpose in the movie beyond setting up those movies, and is completely odd. It doesn't fit at all, is never referred to again. Very strange. I could go on with the problems. There's loads. All of them relate to the script missing the mark. The script obviously wanted to do a certain story and then it's fit the characters into it, and it also wanted to have a very specific take on some characters that are controversial - Batman for example you feel they wanted to do a comic true version of the character but also wanted to up the grit and they've decided the best way to do that is make him more eager to kill. It rushes to get to moments it hasn't earned. And it's been edited with a hatchet. But there is some good in this. I think the story is cackhanded, and was never going to be a masterpiece, but it fundamentally could work with a more intelligent approach. The main narrative works - Batman hating Superman absolutely works for the reasons they establish. It works too well though and they then struggle to overcome it, a smarter script would work better. The imagery is a bit on the nose (the opening invokes 9/11 far too heavily) and often just copied from the page (the montage of Superman 'doing good' has an image that is ripped from the cover cover of All Star Superman, for instance, and is one of the better in the film). There are some lighter moments, fleeting lines offering some relief from the gloom. The action is good, the highlight being Batman taking on a room of goons and actually, for the first time on screen, fighting like he should. And if nothing else it's entertaining enough. So I don't know really what to make of it. It isn't a particularly good movie, but it's also not without merit. As a comic fan it pisses me off in many respects, in other respects I quite like it. It's intensely stupid in some respects, full of holes and requiring leaps of logic your brain won't allow you to make without question. It develops plotlines it hasn't earned. It has thrilling moments, good action scenes, some emotion, but all founded on idiocy. I suspect this will be liked by audiences more than critics, but it's never going to be more than a 6/10 movie, and for some people is going to 3/10.

Finished Daredevil. A really good season, I'm not sure where it sits with Season 1. I think it's more even, is consistently good, whilst Season 1 had a weaker few episodes but also as number of great ones. It's let down by missing a true villain, and feels a little eclectic at times, but it benefits from better performances generally and a brilliant turn by Bernthal. Wasn't even quite on board with Elektra, but I dislike the character in the first place. And the Hand never really quite clicked. But beyond that nothing was any great problem with the fundamentals. They even got the costume right. Well better than last year anyway. Recommended. And cool teaser for Luke Cage.

Having a bit of a Snyder evening in preparation for BvS tomorrow. Man of Steel and the Watchmen Directors Cut. I don't hate MoS like some do. It's a decent movie if completely overblown by the end, and it's take on Superman is a bit dour for a character who is basically a personification of hope, but it has a decent if very thin storyline and good performances and action. It does the portrayal of Superman's (and others) abilities exceptionally well The rewatch has also revealed that I find supporting baddie Faora curiously attractive... Watchmen remains Snyder's best I think. It nails everything about the look and style of the graphic novel, and has some brilliant casting and a clever adaptation of the finale which simply wouldn't work on screen. Again the action is great. You do get the idea that a lot of the subtlety of the comic is missing though, it really does look like the film was developed just using the pages as a storyboard to work from and it misses some of the layers of satire and commentary in the process. But it genuinely is a good movie, surprisingly. I see BvS tomorrow and my expectation, having never been particularly high, is at rock bottom. With that in mind, if it looks nice and gas some good action, I'll be cautiously happy with it. I'm concerned it goes even further away from the characters than MoS did, and also that is going to be a rushed blancmange of a film, but give me striking images and some good action and I'll take it....

In the right role, Knightley is fine. Otherwise, she usually lives up to the description Mark Kermode gave her (in conjunction with Orlando Bloom) in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies - 'So wooden its like watching 2 chairs mating'.

Giant Bomb have a 2hr play through up at the moment. Not watched all of it but seems they've had a lot of problems with it crashing. Looks nice though, and yeah it's Dark Souls for sure.

Yes reading earlier Wonder Woman is not quite done filming but it isn't far off. When I say they'll look to bin Snyder at the first opportunity I'm not saying they'll get rid of him on Justice League, it would take BvS being an absolutely awful box office performer, which it just won't be, to do that at this point. What I mean is they might say goodbye post Justice League, and shy away from Snyder being the DCEU 'visionary' he's been so far. DC doesn't have a Fiege overlooking the whole thing like Marvel does, with (originally) Whedon having a big influence on things in the wider universe. WB and DC just have Snyder kinda doing both things and it's not really working (although it looks like Goyer dropped the ball big time as well this time) already.